Business Week
A successful Business Week ran from Monday 23 July – Friday 27 July with all the profits raised by students donated to the RSPCA. The Year 11 Business Management students ran small business enterprises during recess and lunchtime gaining valuable lessons and experience about the demands and rewards of running a small business.
After a lot of preparation and planning detailed business plans were submitted with businesses ready for operation such as BBQ Bandits, Flippin’ Pancakes, Plenty of Pizza and Coffee & Co. The Year 11 students involved showed real entrepreneurial flair with a canny ability to turn the curriculum into a real-life setting.
Tayla Vanderwert reflected on Business Week
My business was called Coffee & Co. alongside Lizzy, Lily and Isabella, we sold coffee, hot chocolates, slices and doughnuts to our school community. We used the ‘Little Bean’ to help promote our business, as well as a resource to produce the goods, which we sold. From the three mornings that we ran our business, we sold over 150 coffees in total alongside the individual sweets, with the profits kindly being donated to the RSPCA.
This year’s Year 11 business class agreed on donating all profits to RSPCA. We chose this organisation because in previous years, classes have aimed profits at humanitarian foundations so we wanted to choose something new and different. We thought that the RSPCA would be a good place to donate the funds due to their passion in helping the animals, whilst people in our cohort are like minded to this issue.
Small Business Week has been a learning curve for some, learning how to promote a business and attract customers, learning how to work cooperatively with people in your group to formulate ideas and ultimately help to generate and run successful businesses. It has broadened our knowledge of the amounts of time and effort which goes into a small scaled business, whilst also being a practical exercise helping us to understand the content we are learning currently in Business Management.
Overall, the week was a success for all groups and personally, I really enjoyed this experience.
William Chen reflected on Business Week
Our business was named “Greasy Grove”, a business that sold nothing but soft drinks, pizzas and Krispy Kreme doughnuts at extremely low prices, for three consecutive days. Alongside with Ben, Liam, Luka and Albert we were able to sell out all our pizzas (over 200 slices) and doughnuts (over 500 doughnuts), leaving us with $447.80 profit. All of which is kindly being donated to the RSPCA.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is a charity that stands strongly against animal abuse, and this year our year 11 Business management cohort feels passionate enough about this issue that we have agreed to donate all our profiting funds to the RSPCA charity. We know that RSPCA will put this money to good use, improving the lives of many animals, whether it be providing food and veterinary care for animals in the shelters; funding enforcement proceedings against animal abusers and rescuing animals from abusive or neglectful environments.
Overall Business week has been nothing but a success. Our business definitely hit a few bumps along the road, whether it be communicational errors, over-estimating the size of the market, supplier issues etc. But these are all learning errors, which we as students would have learned otherwise. It was a great practical exercise that helped us understand and learn new content, which would have been much harder to learn sitting down and reading through the textbook. In the end I had lots of fun and I learned a lot from this experience.
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